Ben Franklin Gets a Makeover

For the latest word on biographical museums, check out the newly revamped Benjamin Franklin Museum in Philadelphia. If it hasn’t shaken the “great man of history” myth entirely, it at least offers more transparency about Franklin’s life–and his living quarters.

Unlike the old museum, the new one, opening today, devotes considerable attention to Franklin’s personal life. It shows his very expansive view of family, his rich social network and his evolving attitudes about slavery. In some respects, Franklin seems quite contemporary–his career as a political revolutionary gained steam after a British court chastised him for leaking some letters.

“People don’t know very much his personal life; they don’t know much about him as a man,” says curator Page Talbott. “Our goal is to augment that.”

Unlike other Founding Fathers, Franklin lived a large share of his life abroad (he served in London and Paris as a diplomat). Once he returned to America, he opted for a house in the city (Philadelphia) rather than spending a fortune on a sprawling mansion in the country.

By 1812 family had dismantled that city house with scant imagery surviving. So when the Franklin museum first opened in 1976, designers Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown developed a minimalist monument: a skeletal outline of the Philadelphia home’s frame, a “ghost house,” replicating its proportions. The Franklin museum itself landed below ground, where puppets reenacted scenes from his political life and phones could ring up Franklin contemporaries for their opinion of him.

Visitors traveled to the underground museum via a long ramp. “That journey was a bit grim really,” says one of the new museum’s designers, Dinah Casson. “It was a bit like going to an underground car park.” The new museum entrance involves a shorter trip: via a staircase or an elevator.

If the London-based firm of Casson Mann seems like an odd pick for a museum about an American revolutionary, Casson shrugs it off, pointing out her firm’s deep credentials in designing another subterranean museum, the Cabinet War Rooms of the Churchill Museum, and that Franklin, thanks to his diplomatic career, had many European connections.

Casson and her team came up with the idea of reconfiguring the Franklin museum quarters to resemble more of a domestic space and echo the contours of the Franklin Philadelphia house. But visitors won’t find 18th century verisimilitude—no elaborate wainscoting or a completely tricked-out salon or a bedroom.

“These spaces are meant to evoke to ‘roomness,’ but they’re like stage sets” says curator Rosalind Remer, pointing out that visitors can peer through all the rooms at once since there are only partial walls and floating ceilings. Fresh on the heels of curating a 2005 independent Benjamin Franklin tercentenary show tracking the patriot’s voluminous accomplishments, Remer and Talbott dived into curating the new museum and aimed to make the polymath more “relatable” by naming the five exhibition rooms after his personality traits.

So now visitors will find a room named “Ambitious & Rebellious” tracking Franklin’s printing and revolutionary activities (including the young Ben’s running away from an printing apprenticeship with his brother in Boston). “Motivated to Improve” follows his creation of civic institutions. “Curious and Full of Wonder” traces his scientific explorations, while “Strategic and Persuasive,” chronicles his diplomacy. And in “Ardent & Dutiful” visitors will find outlined his extensive social and family ties, perhaps more complex that many would anticipate.

Casson Mann

Image from the revamped Benjamin Franklin Museum in Philadelphia.

Visitors should leave behind any midcentury notions of a nuclear family. The museum shows Franklin lived in households brimming with nonrelatives. In Philadelphia, for instance, he resided with his mother-in-law and grandchildren as well as “houseguests, boarders, apprentices, and free and enslaved servants.”

“Wherever he lived, he established a household with friends and family members,” Remer says. “To his friends, he had this incredible ardor. He was so sociable.” Indeed, she says, Franklin had some 600 correspondents—people he wrote to on regular basis; these letters are “not just quick notes” but “are so full of warmth and love,” Remer says. “These are people with whom he has real intellectual and emotional rapport.”

At the same time, the museum does not gloss over the true nature of some Franklin family ties. For example, exhibition text states Deborah Read “met Franklin when he first arrived in Philadelphia from Boston, but she married another man, who then abandoned her. In 1730, Deborah and Benjamin entered into a common-law marriage.” (They lacked proof that her first husband had died.)

While Deborah helped raise Benjamin’s son, “The identity of William Franklin’s mother is not known,” according to the exhibit.

The museum is candid about the fraying of Benjamin’s bond with his son over political differences: “William’s loyalty to Britain not only strained his relationship with his father, but also with his own son, William Temple Franklin. During the Revolution, William was imprisoned in the governor’s mansion and afterward, he moved to England, remaining there until his death.”

The exhibition also describes how Franklin lived apart from Deborah in London for long stretches—from 1757 to 1775, except two years: “In London, Franklin took lodgings with a widow, Margaret Stevenson, and her daughter, Mary (Polly), who became like family to him. Franklin returned to Pennsylvania in 1762, but two years later resumed his post in London. Deborah died before Benjamin returned home in 1775.”

But don’t look for the museum to confirm rumors of Franklin dalliances. “There’s no evidence that he had any affairs while Deborah was alive,” Remer says. “Is there evidence that there were very close personal relationships with women? Yes.”

“The fact is that when he became friends with women, he remained friends with them for his entire life,” says Remer. These are relationships filled with intense admiration and intense intellectual connection and emotion, she says, adding these friendships would be difficult for some people today to understand.

Two interactives let visitors learn about Franklin’s “adopted families” in the four cities he lived in (Boston, Philadelphia, London and Paris), both inside his household or his close friendship circle.

For example, in Passy, just outside of Paris, “Franklin befriended his neighbor Madame Brillon, an acclaimed musician and composer,” museum text states. “He became a frequent guest at her home. She and Franklin developed a warm friendship and corresponded until the end of his life.”

Then there’s the philosopher’s widow: “Mme Helvétius lived near Franklin in Paris. He became part of her social circle of well-known artists and philosophers. Both were widowed, and Franklin proposed to her in 1779, but she declined.”

The museum breaks new ground with an interactive objectively showing Franklin’s mixed record on slavery. “Did Franklin oppose slavery?” it asks, adding, “Historians don’t agree.” Visitors are invited to judge for themselves after reviewing several items.

Ben and Deborah Franklin did help the English reformer Reverend Thomas Bray set up a school for slaves in Philadelphia, the exhibit points out.

The interactive also reveals how Benjamin traveled to England with his slave Peter, but the slave King accompanying his son William ran away. In a letter to Deborah, Benjamin says a woman took in King, making him her servant (not slave): “So the Lady sent him to School, has him taught to read and write, to play on the Violin and French Horn, with some other Accomplishments more useful in a Servant.”

In 1757, Franklin’s will called for his slave Peter and his wife Jemima to be freed after his death. But how long did they live? The record is unclear if Franklin owned slaves after the late 1760s but his daughter still did when he died in 1790.

“I knew very little about him when we started,” designer Casson admits. Her goal throughout? For “people to come out [feeling] like they had smelled his overcoat.”

The pairing of British designers with American curators resulted in interesting discussions, she says. In considering the room scheme, Casson says her team had identified the privy as “being the place where he had all these good ideas because that’s where, you know, you spend time having good ideas.” But “we were accused of being a bit scatological” and told “this is an English interest, which Americans don’t necessarily have. The privy didn’t survive unfortunately.”